


The Night Is Behind Us

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-27 18:04:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8411272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: “Frank hasn’t been sleeping since she came.”Or, late nights with Frank, Laurel, and their daughter, post-chaos and post-everything.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the poem “Seal Lullaby” by Rudyard Kipling. This is also inspired largely by the choral adaption by Eric Whitacre, which was pretty much all I listened to while writing this. So. Give that a listen if you’re inclined.

Frank hasn’t been sleeping since she came.

Laurel notices it, like she notices everything, even if her hormones are all hopelessly out of whack and she no longer feels much like herself at all anymore. He’d always been an insomniac before, prone to be up at all hours of the night for days at a time, missing out on sleep like he simply forgot it was a normal human function and never missing a beat, as if he just didn’t need it. And he’d always been an insomniac before but now there’s something different; a palpable restlessness about him. Uneasiness. He isn’t sleeping and it’s not because of work, not because of Annalise or the veritable laundry list of illegal errands he used to run for her on the regular. Not because he doesn’t have time.

Because of _her_. She came, their daughter came, and he hasn’t been sleeping since.

Sometimes it still doesn’t sink in for Laurel, the fact she’s a mother; it all still feels strikingly foreign, like something that’s only ever happened to people she knows but not to _her_. Sometimes she has to stop and take a moment to process that the tiny, pink, blue-eyed creature in her arms is real, and _hers_ , her and Frank’s flesh and blood, a little compact, frequently-screaming amalgamation of their DNA. Sometimes she doesn’t believe she came from her, either. Doesn’t believe something so pure _could_ come from her; this unworthy body of hers.

Bella. They’d called her Bella – for beauty, and it’s an apt name. And she loves her so much it’s almost overwhelming, loves her so much it rattles her to her core sometimes, fucking terrifies her, and she knows Frank loves her too. More than anything. And still…

Still, he hasn’t been sleeping.

It’s been a week and she’ll wake sometimes to find him with his eyes wide open beside her, either watching her or staring off into space, at the ceiling, and she never asks why, and he never offers an explanation. Or other times she’ll roll over and reach out for him and find her hand met with only cold sheets, rumpled by the imprint of his body left behind. And if she wasn’t still aching so badly from the delivery and C-section she’d go after him, seek him out, but for a few days she doesn’t. She lets herself wonder and doesn’t ask, and every morning her eyes flutter open and find him beside her, and she wonders if his absence was maybe only a dream.

Then, on the ninth night after her arrival, she does. She follows.

She comes to sometime around three in the morning, if the glowing red numbers on her alarm clock are to be believed, and her vision is hazy at first but she manages to discern quickly enough that he’s gone again, the sheets beside her still warm with his residual body heat and cooling quickly. Laurel rubs the sleep out of her eyes and sits up, and the room is still around her, filled with fuzzy greyness except for the lines of moonlight filtering in through the blinds, patterning the bed. And there’s no particular reason she hauls herself to her feet and pads down the hallway, out the door into the night, searching for him. Maybe it’s the fear of losing him, again. The innate fear that for some reason he’ll leave again, vanish like a ghost in the night, and she’ll never see him again.

There’s no particular reason she heads for the nursery, either. Somehow she knows that’s where he’ll be.

And she’s right. She steps inside, bare feet scraping the carpet silently, and finds him there, standing beside the crib with his hands on the side, his tall, dark form looming over it. He’s shirtless, in a pair of grey sweatpants, chin angled down, hair mussed, intent; a peaceful silhouette. Gentle giant. From the side his blue eyes catch the moonlight and she can see something in them, something she doesn’t think she’s ever seen before. Love and affection – but a different kind, not the kind he has for her, no, this is something else. Not necessarily better or worse, more or less. Just _different_.

The room is still and Laurel moves silently before coming to a stop in the doorway, and she can’t see their daughter but she’s sure she’s sleeping just as silently; over the course of the past week since they’d brought her home from the hospital she’s proven herself to be abnormally quiet baby, almost unnervingly so. Frank had joked that she must get it from her; all that silence. He’d seemed to find it funny.

Mostly Laurel just finds it fucking terrifying.

He’s over by the window a fair distance away from her, and doesn’t hear her approach, like he’s lost some of his ultra-sensitive spidey-senses, that uncanny ability to sense people he’d used to have, always on high alert. She doesn’t think he can see or hear a single thing in the world besides the child lying before him; he looks like he could stand there forever, like he’s been standing there for hours, so long he’s been cemented in place. He’s as silent and steady as a sentinel, her protector, never moving an inch. Laurel can barely tell if he’s breathing.

So this is where he goes. It makes sense to her, now.

She considers saying something, and half-forms a word on her tongue before letting it die. She doesn’t need to; she doesn’t need words right in this moment, and he doesn’t either. Words are never enough and somehow right then silence feels light years more profound, like it’s their natural state, the state where they’re most honest. Most real. Nothing to hide behind. Frank looks different than she thinks she’s ever seen him and it’s not because he’s stripped of all the expensive Rolexes and three-piece suits and hair gel, and – well, quite literally almost _stripped_. Different than the man behind the mask he wears; that part he plays. Frank the fixer. The henchman. The _hitman_.

She shakes the thought away.

This past year has been hell. They’re owed some silence now, some peace, however fleeting it may be, and Laurel isn’t about to waste it. So she doesn’t. She watches Frank watching their daughter, a smile pulling at her lips; tiny and genuine, mirroring the faint one on his. She watches the moonlight tumble over him in silver rays, flickering in and out and fading when the clouds pass. Waxing and waning. All she can see is him. All he can see is _her_ , their baby, and something heavy and sweet wells in her throat because they’ve come so far, been through _so much_ to get here, to this higher ground, this safe haven. Sometimes she loves him more than she knows how to handle, so much she can almost feel herself about to burst out of her skin. She loves him more, now, after Bella – when she’d already been so sure she’d hit her limit. Somehow those roots had gone deeper.

She doesn’t think there’s a limit to loving, now. To the capacity of her heart. In fact she _knows_ there isn’t.

Laurel leaves them, after a few minutes. She leaves them like that, leaves Frank to their daughter and all their shared silence. Leaves him to his fascination. Leaves him, to his loving.

 

~

 

He starts to do it all the time. At least once a night – twice, sometimes, if his insomnia is particularly bad. Disappearing into the nursery for hours at a time.

She wonders how Frank can possibly think she doesn’t notice. She finds it pretty endearing, actually, but never brings it up or teases him. It feels private to him, those tender moments; private and precious and sometimes when she watches now and then she can’t help but have the sense that she’s intruding, like she doesn’t quite belong there. She wonders what he thinks about, all that time. If he’s as crippled by fear as she is. If he’s so fascinated he has to keep blinking and staring and pinching himself to ensure their daughter is real and not some beautiful dream, some mirage, some little fallen angel. Some ethereal being they’ve dreamed up together.

It feels like that, sometimes. Like they did dream her up together and brought her into the world and by some miracle made her real.

Three days later she breaks the silence, for the first time.

It’s sometime close to sunrise when Laurel goes to find him, and he’s been gone for at least two hours, maybe more. Probably more. She wonders how he never gets bored but this seems to be the cure for his restlessness, his unease, assuaging all his worries. He watches her. Guarding her, protecting her from something, some unseen force. Asher had joked about him being Annalise’s bodyguard once and Laurel thinks he might as well be their tiny daughter’s bodyguard too now, scarcely ever leaving her side.

She wonders if he ever holds her, when he comes here. He doesn’t seem to. He never holds her much, even during the day; he seems content to watch from afar, like a doll in a store window he can’t have, or maybe shouldn’t have. Doesn’t _deserve_ to have.

She shakes the thoughts away, again, and quips softly from the doorway, “You keep doing this there’s not much of a point in us having a baby monitor.”

Her voice carries across the air sweetly and startles him, snapping him out of his trance-like state so violently she almost feels guilty, for intruding, ruining the moment. But his features relax into an easy smile before she can and she stops feeling guilty, stops feeling anything but warm all over, giddy and thrilled, even sleep-addled as she is.

“How’d you know I was in here?” he asks, keeping his voice low, and she scoffs, folding her arms and making her way over to him, the legs of her baggy sweatpants dragging on the carpet.

“You really think I don’t notice you disappearing for hours in the middle of the night, every night?” she teases, and pretends to be scandalized, though a yawn mixes itself in with her words, garbles them. “You’ve… left me for another girl, huh?”

She comes to his side and stops there, placing her hands on the crib too and peering down into it as he murmurs, “Guilty as charged.”

Laurel chuckles under her breath, and takes in the sight of Bella there, lying still in her crib on her back, clad in a onesie with a pattern she can’t make out in the darkness – but she can make out the rest of her, clear as day, from her diminutive fingers clenched into a fist and equally diminutive toes, to the dusting of dark, downy hair on her head, to the rounding of her pink cheeks, the way her little body twitches faintly, in the midst of something; a dream, maybe. She can’t help but wonder what it is she dreams about, wonder about the inner workings of her little brain, and comes to the conclusion that she doesn’t understand, that she can’t – and will probably only understand less and less as the years go on and she grows.

Years. This is permanent. _She’s_ permanent – not some tiny thing that’s going to disappear once the timer is up, once her lease is up, like an angel on loan. She’s permanent in their world, for them both, and Laurel has had many luxuries in her life but never the luxury of permanence, has always continuously dealt with loss after loss after loss. Abandonment, from her father and her mother. And she’ll never do that to her. She’ll have to die first.

She loves her and she thinks she learns to love all over again, in a million and one new equally frightening ways, right then and there, in that exact moment.

“You don’t have to do this, y’know,” she remarks, voice barely a whisper, to keep from rousing her. “Stand here all night.”

He shrugs. “I don’t mind. I like it. Like… bein’ here, right when she starts cryin’. So she doesn’t ever think she’s alone.”

Laurel inches closer to him, curling herself into his side where they stand. “You’re gonna spoil her rotten. You’re already so wrapped around her little finger it’s not even funny.”

“It’s not just bein’ here with her. Sometimes I feel like I gotta check on her, too. Make sure she’s okay. That she’s still…”

“Breathing?” she finishes for him, and he looks over at her, grim, almost devastated by the thought of losing her. Laurel grins. “I do that too. Like one of these nights she’ll just stop.” She shakes her head, letting out a sigh and watching Bella’s nose wrinkle, twitch like a rabbit. “She’s a good sleeper. Really… weirdly good, for a newborn.”

“She’s like you,” he jokes, smirking over at her, hair flopping in front of his eyes in the most disarming way. “Good at everything already.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Okay, I’ve already had your baby. You really think you need to win me over more?”

“Yeah,” Frank tells her, honest, and lowers his lips for a moment, pressing a kiss to her shoulder. “’M never gonna stop needin’ to.”

She laughs, still softly, not wanting to disturb her. Frank joins her, and after a moment they sober up.

“So that’s why she hardly ever wakes me up? Because you’re in here all night?”

“Not all night.” He pauses, considering that. “Lot of it, though.”

“Can’t sleep?”

Frank lets out a breath, placing his hands on the side of the crib and hooking his fingers through the slats. “Yeah. And I don’t wanna. Feels like I’ll miss somethin’ if I do. And I just like lookin’ at her.” He goes quiet, shaking his head. “It’s dumb, I know, I-”

“It’s not dumb,” she soothes, giving him a small grin once more. She places a hand on his upper arm, drawing them together, back to that intimacy that’d once felt so foreign after months apart but now feels so natural, so effortless, like falling back in a rhythm they’d never broken. “It’s sweet.”

They’re silent, a moment. Frank is the one to put it to rest, this time around.  

“I get worried, too,” he confesses, and swallows thickly. “That somethin’ bad’ll happen to her if I leave. I keep… havin’ dreams, something happens to her. We lose her. ‘Cause of me, or somethin’ I did. Or ‘cause I wasn’t with her.” He clenches his jaw, grave. “I get scared, when I can’t see her. Scared she’s gone.”

Laurel smirks, tries to lighten the mood. “I never would’ve thought out of the two of us _you’d_ be the helicopter parent.”

Frank doesn’t laugh, or even smile. He seems worried now, consumed with fear, no longer well hidden under the blanket of contentment from before. It’s an overwhelming sort of terror, and she wonders if that’s what he stands here and feels, too: fear, just as much as he feels love and maybe even more. Fear that he’ll fuck up, that maybe he’s fucked up already, bringing a child of his body into the world. Fear that he can’t be enough, that he’ll always fall short of what she needs. Fear that he’s good for nothing because he’s never been good for _anything_ , and least of all something so perfect, so worthy of adoration, worthy of everything; their daughter, who should never have to want for a single thing in her life.

That’s part of it, she realizes; why he stands here. So she doesn’t want him and find him gone. So she doesn’t want for _anything_. He wants to give her everything. Be everything. Lose sleep to be with her and keep her happy and safe, and Laurel melts at the thought, resting her head on his shoulder, casting her eyes down on Bella’s sleeping form.

“Nothing bad’s gonna happen to her,” she assures him, voice low. He looks over at her, eyes wide, corners drooping with something like sorrow. “You wouldn’t let it. Neither would I.”

Frank nods, taking the words in, pondering them, accepting them. Then, he lets out a breath.

“Still don’t think she’s real sometimes, you know?” he remarks, almost absentmindedly, more to himself than to her.

And she does. Laurel does know. Sometimes she thinks one day she’ll wake up and it’ll all have been a dream; Frank leaving and coming back to her, the fire, almost losing her daughter before she’d even been born, before she’d had a chance at life at all. She’ll blink and wake up and none of it will have been real because it doesn’t _feel_ real, even now, even when she holds her own flesh and blood in her arms, feels the warmth of her little body, breathes in the fresh, soft smell of her new skin, her new hair, her new _everything_.

She hums in agreement, then sighs, watching Bella’s feet twitch, kicking something invisible away. “What d’ you think she dreams about?”

“You,” he answers, without thinking. “You’re her whole world.”

“And you too.”

Frank shakes his head, playing it off casually though she can tell there’s something deeper hidden there, some darker meaning. “Nah. Not like I’m worth dreamin’ about.”

“Oh I don’t know,” she drawls, sleepily. “You _are_ pretty dreamy.”

Frank opens his mouth to say something back, but a little gargled cry coming from inside the crib cuts him off before he can. Bella comes awake with a start, a twitch passing through her, and her eyes blink open, wide with cornflower blue irises, so identical to Frank’s it’s still almost jarring to Laurel at times. She seems confused for a moment, yanked unceremoniously from her happy slumber as she is, then promptly bursts into loud, noisy tears, her little face crumpling in a way that tugs at Laurel’s heartstrings, makes her body ache with some innate, biological response to her cries. Within seconds she’s reached down and scooped Bella up into her arms, shushing and cooing gently to her in low, even tones, and Frank angles himself toward the two of them, watching silently for a moment as her wails crescendo, grow more and more distraught and higher in pitch, inconsolable.

“She hungry?” Frank asks, and Laurel nods wearily, sighing, not entirely thrilled by the fact, half-asleep as she is.

“Yeah, think so,” she replies, reaching for the front of her tank top to tug it down over her breast, struggling a bit awkwardly to support her while doing it. “I got it.”

“Good,” he quips. “’Cause I ain’t exactly equipped.”

She rolls her eyes, and shifts the baby up slightly, in towards her breast. “Hilarious. Now let’s just hope she doesn’t inherit your sense of humor.”

Frank looks like he’s about to make some teasing remark but refrains, and instead focuses his attention on watching her, his gaze heavy, so intent he might as well be touching her. Laurel brings Bella in close, feeling that odd little prick as she latches onto her nipple, the tug and the flow of her milk letting down; not very pleasant and still making her ache, her sensitive skin raw, but she knows it’ll get better eventually. She wonders if she’ll ever fully get used to it, though, any of it; nursing the child that she grew inside of her from her own body, being so impossibly _close_ to the little being in her arms, a degree of intimacy unmatched by any she’s ever felt before, such total and complete dependence. It’s unnerving. It’s most _definitely_ a thousand different kinds of terrifying and this was never her plan, any of it, not even close.

But she’s adapting, slowly. Making adjustments. Everything in due time. Everything will fall into place and it falls into place just a bit more right then, when she glances over at Frank and finds him watching her, with that same tender, blue-eyed affection he’d watched Bella with before, a hint of a smile on his lips, all broken down and sincere as he stands before her. He moves closer after a moment, pressing a kiss to her temple, curling an arm around her waist to draw her against him. And he watches. Doesn’t disturb them. Doesn’t make any of the crass comments about her boobs she maybe would’ve expected of him, once upon a time ages ago. Fatherhood has made him softer, in so many ways; softer around the edges and quieter, more pensive, holding everything with more significance. Looking at the world with a fresh pair of eyes like their daughter, as if seeing everything for the first time all over again with childlike fascination.

As if loving _her_ for the first time all over again.

Laurel moves Bella away as she finishes eating, making all sort of her high-pitched hums and gurgles and other contented baby-noises, and goes to raise her up to her shoulder to burp her before she stops, suddenly, glancing over at Frank and finding him still watching, looking like he wants to reach out, but something stills his hand, over and over, holds him back. She can sense it; she’s always been so in tune with him, so bonded in that irrevocable, intrinsic, cellular sort of way, and it’d been deep before but now that they share a child it seems impossibly deeper, some level beyond just closeness.

“Here,” she says, suddenly, placing her hand on Bella’s hair and stroking it, making to hand her off to him. “You wanna burp her?”

But he bristles, inexplicably, shifting his weight, shaking his head. “Nah, you, uh, you go ahead. You’re better at it ‘n me.”

“It doesn’t take much skill,” she jokes, then sobers, pressing her lips into a thin line. “She wants you. She loves her daddy, isn’t that right Bella Bella?”

Doubt flickers in his eyes, clear as day. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she affirms. “’Course. Here, take her.”

So he does. He hesitates again, just for half a fraction of a second, but she doesn’t give him much choice in the matter as she goes to pass her off, cradling her tiny body and placing a hand behind her head. And it’s not like Frank has never held her before, ever, because he has; many times, too many to count, yet she can’t help but have the sense he’s keeping his distance for a reason, like he believes he should only ever be a spectator in her world; a passive bystander. That maybe it’s better that way for her, for everyone. But when he takes her in his arms, her tiny body dwarfed by him, by his hands, his whole demeanor transforms, melts, goes soft. His shoulders droop and he looks down at her with that same fascination from before but now there’s that uneasiness about him again, that palpable fear lurking in his bones, a constant companion like his shadow behind him.

He’s happy and he’s scared. And it’s a different kind of _scared_ than hers; a darker, more sinister kind. Something she can’t fix. Something she’ll maybe never fully understand.

“You got her?” she asks, and he nods, swallowing.

“Yeah. Yeah, hey Bella Bella. I got you.” He grins, holding her to his chest and taking the burp cloth from Laurel when she hands it over. Bella makes a soft little noise, something like surprise at the suddenness of the transition, and he coos to her, soothing her, rocking her gently. “’S all good, I got you.”

He does it so naturally, she thinks. Cares for her. So naturally it’s hard to tell he’s scared at all, so naturally he shouldn’t be scared, and _wouldn’t_ be if it weren’t for the demons in his past, the monsters eternally lurking under the bed they share; things they can run and even hide from but never truly escape, never forget. It’ll always be there, the things he’s done, the things she’s done. Things _they’ve_ done. There’s no going back in time, maybe no such thing as normal for them anymore – and even less so now, now that they have this tiny third person in their lives, so small but so earth-shattering, and life-altering and catastrophic in the best possible way. Now that they’re a family and _family_ is a word that’s never felt comfortable for Laurel, never felt genuine, never something she’s particularly identified with for any reason other than a sense of obligation. But it’s what they are, however tiny and messed up they may be. A family.

And they can find normal again, for her sake. For their own. They will.

“’S all good,” he says again, voice softer and lilting, leaning in to her hair and breathing her in and pressing a tender kiss to her little head, so soft and breakable, so impossibly light in his strong arms, which look like a fortress around her. “Got quite an appetite, y’know that? An Italian appetite. Soon enough you’ll be a spaghetti eatin’ champ to rival the best of ‘em.”

“Mmm,” Laurel hums, amused. “Probably a result of your parents continually shoving their cooking down my throat while I was pregnant.” She grins, and melts against him, circling an arm around his middle with another yawn. “Pretty sure I have them _and_ you to thank for a solid… twenty pounds of my baby weight.”

“Hey,” he whispers into Bella’s ear, grinning cheekily as he pats her back, “tell your mom not to complain about my cooking, huh? She knows she loves it. You will, too, once those teeth of yours come in and you can start tearin’ into meatballs.” He turns his head to look at her then, winking. “I gained weight too, y’know. Sympathy weight.”

She eyes his abdomen, still firm and chiseled as ever with no sign of the pudge that plagues her own, and raises an eyebrow. “Uh huh. _Sure_.”

They talk for a while longer, and after Frank gets a few good belches out of Bella he sets her back down in the crib, just a bit too quickly, almost eager to get her out of his arms, away from him. And he plays it off casually again, like maybe he’s hoping she won’t notice but she does; she’s always been the observant one, ever-perceptive, and pregnancy had royally fucked up her hormones and just about every other one of her senses, but it’d at least left her with her perceptiveness.

“Hey,” she says, suddenly, as he draws away, placing his hands on the side of the crib again. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he nods, and for a moment he looks like he’s not going to elaborate, but when she gives him a knowing look he caves, lets out a breath. “Holdin’ her still freaks me out, sometimes. Like I’m gonna drop her, or… I dunno. Break her.” He pauses. When he continues there’s a strain in his voice, a note of sorrow. “Hurt her, somehow. I…”

“You wouldn’t,” Laurel says, shaking her head and angling herself towards him, inching closer, but he evades her eyes. She frowns. “Look at me.”

He does, eventually, though he makes one hell of an effort not to, to pull away from her, withdrawing back into himself. And maybe once, before Bella, she would’ve let him shut down, shut her out but not now – not now that they have this tiny impossible child and there’s nowhere to hide, no secrets or lies between them. They’re bonded now in a way that’s almost terrifyingly permanent and there’s no escaping that, like it or not. For good.

“You wouldn’t hurt her. And you can’t do anything wrong, in her eyes,” she says, again, more firmly this time. “She loves you.”

“Don’t think she should,” he mutters, lowering his eyes down to her. He looks back up at her, after a moment, grim. “Don’t think you should either, sometimes.”

“Tough luck, then,” she replies, not harshly, still calmly, even soothingly. “’Cause we do. You’ve got two girls who love you and… you better get used to it. We’re not going away any time soon.” She stops, presses her lips in a line. “The only way you’re gonna mess her up is if you make yourself believe you will. Think that… you’re not good enough for her.”

“Yeah,” he answers. “Yeah, I know.” He pauses, and smirks wryly. “I’m not, though. Good enough for her. Nobody is.” Another moment of silence. He shakes his head, watching as Bella slowly but surely drifts off before their eyes, falling back into slumber so easily, so effortlessly, in a way Laurel envies a whole hell of a lot. “She’s… fucking perfect, Laurel. She’s everythin’.”

“ _Shh_ ,” she shushes him, jabbing her elbow into his side as a reprimand. “She can hear you.”

“Right.” He clears his throat, sheepish. “Yeah, sorry. Old habits die hard.”

They stand there for a while longer, letting the darkness envelop them, watching Bella doze and drift further and further out to that black welcoming sea of slumber, returning to whatever baby dreamland she’d inhabited before. It’s only after Laurel is certain she’s out that she moves away from Frank, exhaustion rolling over her suddenly like a blanket of fog, making her eyelids droop.

“You coming back to bed?” she asks, taking a step away.

“Uh, you go on,” he says, just like she’d known he would. He doesn’t seem inclined to budge, ever, like even the damn sky could be falling outside and he wouldn’t take his eyes off her, wouldn’t so much as bat an eye. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

Laurel nods, and turns, padding her way out of the room but pausing in the doorway to glance back at where Frank stands over the crib, over their daughter; her protector, steadfast and sure. Her sentinel. Her solider. Her anything.

And Laurel smiles again, small and subdued. And she leaves him to it.


End file.
